Well… not really a huge celebration, but I figured it would be nice to at least mark what is a bit of a milestone in the history of this little corner of the Talisman Universe!

On this day, twenty one looooong years ago, I posted up a couple of homebrew ideas I’d had for my game of Talisman after joining the Talisman Discussion Group on Yahoo which was started up by Ken Picklesimer. I then figured it would be nice to offer other people a place to have their creations available and it kind of snowballed from there.

At a time when there was no ‘current’ edition of the game, the fan base certainly helped to keep the game alive and was rewarded not too long afterwards with a new edition from Black Industries (GW), which was then revised by Fantasy Flight Games and has now exploded into a number of different products in various formats. Digital versions from the clever boffins at Nomad Games, two licensed versions (so far!) from The OP Games (USAopoly) and a family game, card game, dice game AND a full blown RPG from Pegasus Spiele, as well as a full reprint of the Revised 4th Edition and its many expansions PLUS a host of localised versions across the globe!!

Talisman Island has seen a few changes over the years, and it has certainly seen me through a few changes in life, but we are both still here and loving life and looking forward to what the future may bring!

I’d like to say a big THANK YOU to all visitors to the site and its social media outlets, although at times I am rather remiss with updates and have a filing system that would shame anyone, so I’ve probably got a lot of content that I have simply forgotten to upload! I apologise if you’ve ever sent me anything and it’s been lost in the Horrible Black Void that is my ‘pending folders’… (Seriously though, if I have forgotten something, please ping me and I’ll see about sorting it, even if it’s a few years ago!)

Hopefully visitors find the information on the site useful, or at least interesting, and although real life does rear its head now and again, I’m still beavering away behind the scenes and trying to source information that people might enjoy.

The site has given me some great opportunities in the past few years, not least being able to contribute in a small way with developing the game that I love, but also in becoming a published designer of the two smaller expansions. It was probably a bit of ‘right place, right time’, but I’ll take it!

So, what of the future?

Well, I’m not going anywhere, so the site will continue in much the same meandering way and I’ve finally worked out why the formatting of the WordPress version of the site is off at times and have a plan to rejig the pages over time.

I’ve resolved to play more games of Talisman in future, and wouldn’t mind having a bit of a road trip at some point to play a few games with visitors to the site, be it somewhere local to you, or maybe online via the Digital Edition. It’s not always easy to juggle real life with such plans, but we’ll work something out!

I’ll probably be curating my collection a bit too, as space has become a bit of a problem, and the sudden influx of new localised versions is making me question my collecting strategy! Perhaps I’ll even catalogue it properly on the site like I’ve been thinking about for the last twenty one years!

I’ve started to ramble for a change, so that’ll do for now. Stay tuned in the near future as there might be a couple of giveaways on the site, perhaps of something to help store your game, but I’ll figure out the logistics of that as we go…

Thanks for visiting Talisman Island, and keep playing our favourite game, whichever version you love!